My mother is a bit of a legend.
She’s generous.
She’s funny.
She laughs a lot.
She makes you feel as if you are the only one who is important in her life, though you know she makes everyone in her orbit feel this way. You know this because your childhood home was always filled with people, relatives and friends and random strangers too. You know this because when she had her stroke five years ago, people spilled out of her hospital room waiting to see her each day. Her phone still rings constantly, and people check in on her all the time.
Mum has inspired me to write a few stories of late. I’m aware that she is getting older, that her body and her mind are not what they used to be. While I know this is how nature works, and that time spares no one, it fills me with sadness. And sadness makes me write.
I know Mum feels sad about getting older too, especially since her stroke robbed her of her words. It’s meant that she is unable to say what she wants to say in the same way that she once could. For such a social being as Mum, words are the gold with which she makes her everyday transactions, connecting with people, reassuring them, offering earthy wisdom. She talks about the stroke often, this terrible thing that happened to her.
But most of the time, she is stoic, philosophical. She doesn’t avoid the topic of death. She explains she is not really worried about it. What pre-occupies her is becoming dependant as she ages, and about her loved ones having to care for her, but she doesn’t worry about dying. As usual, her concerns are for others, not herself.
‘I’ve lived a good life,’ she often says. ‘Now, let me show you the dress I want you to bury me in…’
And despite ourselves, we laugh. My mother, who is a bit of legend, always makes me laugh.
Some recent articles about Mum on SBS Voices
Going through my parent’s possessions reminded me of the sacrifices they made
Cooking for my mother now that she can no longer do it for herself